Notes on Brooklyn Real Estate for Brownstoner

Daily posts on real estate listings for Brownstoner, a magazine and web site covering development and renovation in Brooklyn, with a commitment to preservation of historic architecture. Follow recent postings

Let’s be honest: Say you’re a single person making $55,000 a year, optimistically, doing OK, statistically, essentially what qualifies as the margins of low-to-moderate income in New York City. According to the traditional rent-to-income calculation, you don’t even qualify for this studio apartment at 2164 Caton Avenue in a neighborhood “safe to people with a reasonable amount of street smarts,” per the Google Brooklyn safety map.

That means the landlord is going to ask you for a War and Peace-size file with all of your income, taxes, and reams of private information, then likely reject you as too poor for probably the lowest price apartment you can find within an hour’s subway ride of the places essential for your work and life. And you’re one of the people supposedly gentrifying the place. Oh, and by the way, for maintaining the 40 units in this building, the rentier landlord is bringing in a tidy $900,000 profit, according to PropertyShark. Blame the artists!